From the club website:
With a magnificent glacier-carved terrain perfectly suited for a classic Scottish links style design, and its lush, rolling hills, it's no wonder the Moraine golf course is reminiscent of one you'd find in Scotland. In fact, that's where the story of this magnificent course began.
On the coast of Scotland in the late 1800s, a young Alec "Nipper" Campbell worked relentlessly on his game with golf balls he fished from the sea. By age 17, he won the Scottish Open and by age 19, he became the head golf pro at The Country Club at Brookline.
With a professional career spanning more than 30 years, Campbell was an extraordinarily talented golfer in his own right. However, one of most his notable accomplishments came during his time teaching others how to play the game, and play it very well.
While at Brookline, he established his reputation as a masterful mentor of the sport when he guided 20-year-old Francis Ouimet to a historic playoff victory in the 1913 Open, upsetting the great British champions Harry Bardon and Ted Ray in the process. Known to many as the "father of amateur golf," Ouimet, a former caddie, became one of the most beloved players in the sport and changed the face of the game.
It was also at Brookline where Campbell cut his golf course design chops, imparting his knowledge of the game into the greens at this historic club, reworking the course to better suit the longer playing Haskell ball.
Eventually his golf course design talents made their way to Moraine, where Campbell instantly visualized what a great golf course awaited the 170 wooded acres. He also recognized some very familiar terrain. It was reminiscent of the courses in his home country of Scotland; natural topography formed of the rolling, glacier-carved hills of the land.
Guided by his philosophy that the best golf course is built into the land you've got, Campbell masterfully incorporated the plains, drumlins and erratics of the land into a course designed to be a formidable challenge to both seasoned pros and novice players alike. He loved that the golf course at Moraine was never boring, and editors at Golf Digest agreed with his sentiment; ranking it amongst the toughest courses in the country.
A perennial member of Golfweek's prestigious list of Top 100 Classic Courses, Moraine is a showcase for Campbell's innate ability to join the game to the land, rather than force it upon it. The natural terrain provided a perfect opportunity for him to integrate design features from some of the great courses in Scotland, such as the Old Course at St. Andrews, Troon, Prestwick and North Berwick. But Campbell did more than merely mimic great holes. He understood what made them great. This is just one of the many reasons generations of golfers have enjoyed his masterpiece since its completion in 1930, at which time he declared the course to be "a bit of Scotland transplanted to the Miami Valley."